The Best American Travel Writing 2013 (25 page)

Nevertheless, the myth had preceded Humboldt, preceded conquistadors, proliferated with the Inca, and had the force of immutable truth. According to local lore, a gold block the size of a horse’s head and weighing more than 100 pounds had been found on Mount Ananea. The region’s rivers were said to be strewn with glittering nuggets. Garcilaso de la Vega, a half-Inca, half-Spanish chronicler who lived in the late 1500s, wrote that precisely that stretch of Peru contained gold beyond our imagining. Chunks of coruscating rock as large as a human head—and 24-karat pure—had rolled from cracks in the Andean stone.

It isn’t surprising, given the attendant mythology, that a swarm of enterprising locals, toting little more than picks and hammers, would climb those reaches again. They began to come in the 1960s. Senna Ochochoque’s father arrived in 1980, a strapping young man with wildly ambitious dreams and legs sturdy enough to carry them. In La Rinconada, he met Leonor, a young woman who had been born there 15 years earlier. He built a one-room house of rock, covered it with tin, and invited her to live there with him. They proceeded to have four children, of which Senna was the third. Strangely enough, that inhospitable peak was not a bad place to be during those fateful years of the ’80s and early ’90s. The Shining Path, the Maoist terrorist organization intent on capsizing Peru’s power structure, was slashing its way through the countryside, killing whole villages as it went.

This is where Senna’s story shifts, turns, like a skein waiting to ravel. In 1998, when Senna was born, Peru was, for all its rich history, an emerging chrysalis—a nation that had swung violently between democracy and dictatorship for 174 years under the rule of nearly 100 presidents. Three years later, as the country crawled out from under its long decade of civil war—when Juan Ochochoque was still a robust, fully functional miner in La Rinconada—19 Arab terrorists who had pledged their lives to al-Qaeda flew airplanes into American landmarks and, paradoxically, Juan’s future began to brighten: the value of gold began to grow. But months later, that bullish trajectory would halt altogether for Juan. The shaft in which he was working collapsed. Just as in days of yore, when the glacier had sent torrents of water down the ancient tunnels, a plummeting mass of ice now crushed the mine’s delicate corridors and trapped the workers inside. Juan, who had been pounding a wall of stone, along with his six-year-old son, Jhon, who had been sweeping out the gravel, were caught in a sudden, airless black.

When father and son eventually clawed their way to freedom, they thanked the mountain god for their lives, but they soon found they hadn’t escaped entirely. The boy was plagued by a sickness of the spirit the Indians call
susto:
he ducked at the slightest sound, could hardly eat or sleep; he was deeply traumatized. Juan, on the other hand, was suffering a very manifest physical deterioration. His legs ballooned to three times their normal size. His arms grew weak. His joints ached, hands shook; he could scarcely bend his knees. Before long, he began to have seizures; and then came the constant, bone-rattling cough. He couldn’t walk more than a few yards, much less climb the path to the mine.

In the course of a fleeting moment, Juan Ochochoque had become a marginal citizen. He had joined the women, the children, the maimed and dispossessed—those relegated to distaff roles in a full-blooded macho society. He was too sick to do women’s work:
quimbaleteo
, for instance, which requires one to stand on a boulder and rock back and forth, grinding ore with mercury; or
pallaqueo
, in which a woman crawls up a cliff, scavenging for rock that spills from the mouths of mines, stuffing anything that shines into a backbreaking rucksack. Nor could he do even the simplest work: the
chichiqueo
, which requires a woman or child to bend over crushed gravel in standing water for hours, picking through stones in hopes of finding a gold fleck. These were impossible tasks in his condition. But he had to do something: there were bills to pay, mouths to feed. In time, he decided to cook for a living. Hunched over an ethyl alcohol burner on the bare earth of his hut, he produced pot after pot of soups, spaghettis, stews, and sent his family out into the streets to sell them. At night, he drank whatever alcohol was left, to dull the pain of humiliation.

The labors of Juan’s children, which until then had been sporadic and secondary, now became indispensable, primary. His wife, Leonor, and eldest daughter, Mariluz, dedicated themselves to the
pallaqueo
, scaling escarpments with hundreds of women who worked their way up like an army of ants. It is brutal, exhausting work and, in it, a body suffers a pounding battery—no less from the weight of rocks than from the relentless cold, which can dip to −4 degrees Fahrenheit. The women of La Rinconada are old by the time they are 20. Chances are they have lost their teeth. Before girlhood is out, their faces are cooked by sun, parched by wind; their hands have turned the color of cured meat; their fingers are humped and gnarled. You can feel the toll of the
pallaqueo
when you see Senna look up and cringe at the bright, blue sky. She squints at a camera flash, shades her eyes. Her black eyes have turned a milky gray.

According to the United Nations, more than 18 million children between 10 and 14 are engaged in hard labor in Latin America. Most are “informal” workers like Senna—underpaid, overworked, and grossly undercounted. More than 2 million are in Peru, which accounts for the highest ratio of child laborers in all of Latin America. To put it more plainly: one out of every four Peruvian children works regularly, and does so in physically dangerous conditions. Perhaps because of ignorance, certainly because of necessity, parents whose children work alongside them in La Rinconada find nothing wrong with this practice. They are repeating an age-old cycle. Their children accompany them to work just as they once accompanied their parents. When a young mother enters a mine with a baby strapped to her back, she does not know that the dynamite fumes and chemical vapors can do lasting damage to her infant’s brain; ditto for the mother whose child pours mercury into the mix while she grinds away on the
quimbaleteo;
ditto for the father who wades into a cyanide pond side by side with his son. No government official has come around to explain the long-term effects: blindness, brain damage, nerve damage, lung disease, lumbar deterioration, intestinal failure, early death. According to the Institute of Health and Work in Peru, more than 70 percent of all children and adolescents in La Rinconada suffer chronic malnutrition; as many as 95 percent exhibit some form of nervous impairment. But even if the parents of these children were lined up and given this tragic news, they might have no choice but to keep them working anyway. How else could they afford to eat? How else to keep warm? How else to buy the tools to work another day?

Aware that to tamper with this fragile system of survival would be to undermine the poor population’s ability to subsist, the Peruvian government has been slow to outlaw child labor. Peru was one of the last Latin American countries to ratify the United Nations convention that prohibited children under the age of 14 from working (ILO/UN #138). Even so, although Peru finally signed that document in May 2001, the mining boom that immediately followed made it difficult to enforce the law. To do so would mean Peru would have to pull 50,000 children from the nation’s work force. And that is a very hard thing to do when business is booming and a country’s growth rate is among the highest in the world.

Few places expose the dark side of the global economy more starkly than the lawless 25-acre cesspool of La Rinconada. For every gold ring that goes out into the world, 250 tons of rock must move, a toxic pound of mercury will spill into the environment, and countless lives—biological and botanical—will struggle with the consequences. It doesn’t take a social scientist or a chemist to walk through that wasteland and reckon the costs.

For a girl like Senna, there is a further danger, very different from the toxins, vectors, and violence that plague her town. La Rinconada is a humming beehive of brothels, looking for girls precisely her age. A lawyer and social worker, Leon Quispe, who has dedicated himself to the welfare of the community, estimates that anywhere from 5,000 to 8,000 girls, some as young as 14, move through La Rinconada’s cantinas in any given year. They are held captive as sexual slaves. Some come from as far away as the slums of Lima, but most hail from little villages around Puno and Cuzco—a sad cavalcade of gullible girls who arrive in La Rinconada believing they will wait on tables, sell food, and earn good tips; that they’ll be able to send their destitute families some measure of stable income. In their enthusiasm, they hand over their identity cards to a sweet-talking recruiter. What they learn when they arrive is that it isn’t food they will be selling. Their bodies will be the commodities, and the prices have been long established: sex with a bargirl costs a man a few drinks and a few extra
soles;
a young girl’s hymen is worth a seed of gold.

La República
, one of Peru’s major newspapers, explained the racket via a single story: Two 16-year-old girls from a tiny village outside Cuzco were approached in a public park by a woman they knew, a former neighbor. She offered them $500 a month to work at a restaurant in the airport city of Juliaca—all benefits included. Since they were virtually penniless, they readily agreed. But the only time the girls spent in Juliaca was the time it took to change buses. Four hours later, they were in a dilapidated bar in La Rinconada, in time for the miners’ change of shifts. It was then that they learned they were obliged to consort with men, offer them sex. They were told the rules: If a man touched their breasts or genitals, they were not to rebuff him. They would be given a ticket for every six bottles of beer their clients consumed. One ticket was worth 4 Peruvian
soles
, or $1.25. Whatever sex they might negotiate would be traded at a more favorable rate: the proprietor would only take half. The girls quickly found that they had no way to exit that nightmare: they had no papers, no means to travel; and a surly guard with a knife was at the door.

The cantinas in La Rinconada are 24-hour-a-day operations. They do business out of slipshod edifices that climb up the road willy-nilly, alongside the gold-burning shops. During the day, miners come for a beer or to have their mercury-laden nuggets fired down to pure gold. The crude furnaces sit out where everyone can see them, spewing mercury into the open air; the fumes snake through the cantinas and float out onto the glacial snow, La Rinconada’s primary water source. Mercury levels in those public spaces are 5,000 percent higher than what is permissible in regulated factories. But here, no one is measuring. Women and children hurry through the murky haze, hawking their food and water. The sick struggle in and out of doorways, breathing the deadly air. At night, when the drinking establishments turn into brothels, La Rinconada descends through every circle of hell. A deafening music pounds; drunks reel through the open sewage; food vendors traipse through the phantasmagoria as if it were a happy carnival, and small children flit past, laughing and falling into the toxic mud. Downstairs in the brothels, the young girls are lined up against the walls, their faces resolute and grim. Upstairs, by the light of a thousand flickering strobes, sex is traded, violence runs riot, and buckets of urine are tossed from windows as the poor drink away their hard-won gold.

It isn’t a pretty picture. But so famous has La Rinconada become for its wanton nightlife that village boys for miles around come to work in the mines, have sex with women, and drink all the beer they can. A schoolteacher from Puno explained that often the boys are never the same after their journey to the frozen mountain: they drop out, leave home, and go on to a life of profligacy and ruin.

A life of profligacy and ruin was precisely what Juan Ochochoque did not want for his children. He had worked all his life to feed them, house them, give them what he could. Although he was illiterate—although he had never stepped foot inside a school—he began to counsel Senna, who was all of five when they began to cook together over their tiny ethyl stove, that education was her only way out of the grind of poverty. How he knew it is anyone’s guess. There was nothing in Juan Ochochoque’s past to suggest he would value an education, except for a vague perception he seemed to have about the prevailing power structure: the engineers who ran La Rinconada read and wrote; they knew mathematics, physics. A hierarchy was at work, and it involved knowledge and intelligence. He wanted his children to have that advantage. His wife, Leonor, did not necessarily agree. As far as she was concerned, the family needed to make ends meet, and that meant immediate results—not the sort of long-term, hard-won investment that education entailed.

By the time Senna was 10, her father was dead. His bloated body—shot through with chemical toxicity—had reached the crisis point as he left a bus at the foot of Mount Ananea, trying desperately to find a cure. It gave out suddenly as Leonor helped him to struggle across the road. Juan Ochochoque’s long battle with La Rinconada’s poisons was over, but the lesson he left his daughter refused to die: it was he who had pointed out, as his little girl puttered about alongside him, telling him stories, making up ditties, that she was good at words, good at digging out the right ones, good at polishing them to a fine shine; she was a miner of a different kind.

Which brings me to the crux of this story.

I had gone to La Rinconada precisely because of Senna’s words. I had seen a video of her telling the story of her father’s illness and the wreckage it had left behind. Throughout her story, she summoned allusions to the heartbreaking poetry of César Vallejo, using his words to express what she felt. I had never heard, in all my years sitting at dinner tables with the Lima elite, such easy familiarity with Vallejo’s poems. I had been charged by a film company, the Documentary Group, with the task of finding a Peruvian girl in a poor community: a child whose story might be documented by the award-winning American director Richard Robbins in a movie about poverty around the world. His advance film party had shot videos of young girls in the Amazon jungle, of girls in the icy reaches of La Rinconada and Cerro Lunar. Senna was not particularly photogenic. She was shy in front of the camera. Hunched and incommunicative, she didn’t seem like a good candidate for a feature film. But when she started to speak, when she pulled Vallejo’s words from the air to describe her pain—“There are blows in life, so powerful”—a flame seemed to grow within her. I was riveted. “Blows like God’s fury—like a riptide of human suffering rammed into a single soul . . . I don’t know.”